Grateful Dead

Greatest Stories Ever Told

Here’s the plan—each week, I will blog about a different song, focusing, usually, on the lyrics, but also on some other aspects of the song, including its overall impact—a truly subjective thing. Therefore, the best part, I would hope, would not be anything in particular that I might have to say, but rather, the conversation that may happen via the comments over the course of time. With Grateful Dead lyrics, there’s always a new and different take on what they bring up for each listener, it seems.

The songs can “mean” whatever is ready to be reflected in your heart. The songs can allow you to connect with another aspect of humanity in a deeper way. The songs can wash over you, burrow down into your soul, spring back to new life over time, fade away into the background...

Once in awhile, writing this blog, I check my list of songs I’ve written about so far, sure that I must have covered this or that particular song, only to be amazed that I haven’t. I mean: “Friend of the Devil”? Come on! It’s the definition of a story song. It might BE the Greatest Story they ever told.

California has been begging for rain for a few years now, and we are in the midst of a serious drought. Right now, though, and for the past few days, it has been raining—a long, soaking rain with periods of intense thunderstorm activity.

I wrote a fairly complete annotation about the character of Casey Jones, whose story was told in “The Ballad of Casey Jones,” which was, in turn, performed by the Dead at least a couple of times during acoustic sets in 1970. The bare facts of the historical basis for the legend have been pretty well documented.

When the Bush regime invaded Iraq in search of the supposed hidden caches of weapons of mass destruction, I changed the kicker line on the “Annotated Lyrics” website to the line from “Blues for Allah”...

Listening to the new Dave’s Picks (#12, November 4, 1977, at Colgate University) on my way home from work today, I listened as the drummers settled into the familiar Bo Diddley beat out of their drum solo...

A new book is coming out very soon from Simon & Schuster, who are also my publishers. It’s a collection of the lyrics of Bob Dylan, in a definitive edition complete with variant versions of the words, scholarly essays, and, possibly, some degree of annotation—the working title for several months had been The Complete Annotated Bob Dylan Lyrics.

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